What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
Room-temperature superconductivity looks like it might be a step closer to becoming a reality. Let's stick with fiction for the moment though, what technology would you put in a cyberpunk world that makes use of zero-resistance electronics without the need for massive cooling? Super-fast computers? Super-powerful magnets? Maglev? Railguns?
Relatively small, super-high capacity power cells.
This - once we've got small, dense power storage we can do all the cool scifi stuff: man-portable lasers/coilguns, strong augmentics with long battery life, chainswords, autonomous robots that operate for long spans of time.
I saw something once that said when you're writing scifi to pick one technology to improve/add, and have all the changes in the setting flow from that. I almost always pick batteries.
In a cyberpunk setting, I feel like the new tech should be stuff that demonstrates the wealth disparity, being used everywhere, wastefully in rich people's domain, while regular people are dependant on clunky, heavy, maybe unsafe older stuff. Batteries could be a good one for that, easy to build a plot around people stealing the new batteries from advertising drones or electric scooters from uplevel and selling them to shops that retrofit them into augmentic limbs or robots who otherwise need to recharge every couple hours.
Some really good points here. I was thinking about fusion being the classic sci-fi power source, but if you can get massive improvements on existing power sources then you don't really need the huge investments to get there!
Chips that enable better-than-GPT4 performance with the form factor and power usage of a thumb drive. Within the realm of plausible sci-fi, and pretty dangerous from an IT perspective. Any one of your employees could find a thumb drove in the parking lot, plug it into their computer, and then your super secure air-gapped network has an adversary on the inside.
When most of the big computing power has been outsourced to the corps' cloud computers, this could power the cyberdecks that the hackers can use to do their work unmonitored
Depends on what the material is like. If it's brittle like ceramic (as some of currently highest-temperature superconductors are), there is not much you can do with it. But a metal that you can create wires and coils from would be revolutionary. Still, there are limitations to how much current density the superconductor can handle at a given temperature before quenching. Also, high-frequency logic circuits lose power to capacitances and inductances, not just resistances.
I am guessing it will be only really used for power delivery and electromagnetic applications.